The Mech Touch

As Ves and his sister experimented with trying to acquire and control different ghosts, they made a lot of mistakes.

Many more mistakes than they expected.

In fact, they had yet to produce a single positive result!

Ghost after ghost began to pop as the rudimentary interface that Ves constructed and tweaked continually failed to regulate the amount of power flowing through the connection.

However, all of these catastrophic failures still yielded a lot of clues. No experiment was completely useless. A good researcher could use the outcomes to confirm or deny specific theories and identity points of failures that needed to be addressed in order to produce better results.

After popping over a dozen different variations of ghosts that Ves had artificially produced, Ves and Helena quickly figured out several different reasons why the spiritual products blew up in an instant.

"You're too powerful." Ves told the gray mechanical cat. "The power disparity between you and a poor ghost is so gigantic that even the tiniest possible fraction of power that you can channel through the experimental interface is overwhelming the receiver."

"Mraw mraw mraw." The newly fabricated cat replied in her synthesized voice.

"Hmm, I haven't thought about that." He rubbed his hairless chin. "Even though I made these 'ghosts' with my own power, they are generic spiritual products with attributes inherited from myself considering that I am using up my own spiritual power as ingredients. The biggest problem with that is that my domain is slanted towards life and such, which is probably one of the most positive energies that you can find. Your domain is obviously death, and that definitely falls into the category of negative energy. When you put the two together, it is clear that the two will fight each other if we do not take any special measures."

The gray patted her metal paws against the surface of the desk. "Mraaaw."

"Yeah, I suppose that is the obvious answer. A real ghost should be made out of negative energy. Can you lend me a bit of juice?"

"Mraw?"

"Your energy, Helena! Gimme your power!"

"Mraaaw!" The cat shrieked and moved back as if Ves had just stepped onto her tail!

"Oh, stop being melodramatic. You're the Daughter of Death, right? You should be brimming with energy!"

"Mraw mraw mraw!"

"What is this nonsense about being inappropriate? Just do as I say, sister!"

Ves grabbed a hold of the cat he created and utilized his formidable spiritual strength to draw out a small amount of death energy radiating from the mechanical construct.

"Mrraaaaaaaw!"

"What's the big deal? I only siphoned a bit of energy away from you. It is not as if you will notice this loss!"

When Ves put the cat back down, the body inhabited by Helena acted as if she had become a wounded animal.

"Mraw mraw mraw..."

Ves ignored her antics. He instead focused on the death energy that he had managed to extract from his eldest sister and studied its properties carefully.

He had to be exceedingly careful about handling it because he could easily cancel it out if he touched it directly with his own life-attributed spiritual energy.

He had studied and handled death energy in the past. Projects such as the Valkyrie Redeemer, the Death and Gray Lotus allowed him to gain a decent understanding of the peculiar traits of the spiritual attributes of death.

"It is an antithesis towards life. Normally, it should be impossible to use it to animate anything."

That was not entirely true. He had been able to create the Death Lotus for Helena easily enough, so not everything was absolute.

However, it was undeniable that life and death acted like fire and water in each other's presence.

In order to test this relationship, Ves took away a tiny mote of death energy and tried to act upon it by infusing it with his life-attributed spiritual energy.

Predictably, both of them reacted as if they were made up of a bunch of particles and antiparticles. The opposing energies essentially annihilated each other, producing... something... that quickly dispersed out of sight.

The outcome of this particular reaction interested him a lot, and normally he would be more than willing to follow up on this interesting direction of research, but he had a job to do. He needed to make the most important mechanisms of the Geist System work before he could go off exploring random stuff again.

Ves recognized that he had become sidetracked far too many times as of late. If he wanted to get anything serious done, he needed to rein in his boundless curiosity and exert more discipline over the way he spent his time.

The involvement of his sister helped to keep him in line. He could not occupy her time in vain.

"In any case, how can I bring this to life in a form that is usable to the Ghost Project?"

The gray cat had something to say about that. "Mraw mraw mraw."

"The Death Lotus is a good example to draw upon, but don't forget that it shares a symbiotic relationship with you. It is not capable of sustaining itself on its own as I expressly designed it to feed off your own death energy. What I need to make for the Ghost Project is a living spiritual construct that is made out of death energy or other kinds of negative energy. What is most important is that the animated ghosts can operate far outside the expert mech it is operating from. This requirement imposes harsher demands on the stability, strength and cohesion of the spiritual constructs."

There were ways to animate death energy in order to produce actual life. The most significant example was Helena herself. Somehow, their mother had gathered a lot of death energy in the Nyxian Gap and borrowed Ves' own energies in order to give it the spark of life, thereby birthing a brand-new daughter.

Ves hadn't witnessed this event himself and he could only vaguely guess at the steps that his mother had taken to bring life to Helena.

In any case, he could not employ the high-end, resource-intensive process that produced his sister to make a bunch of low-end ghosts. That was as stupid and wasteful as using a battleship cannon to kill a random human on the street.

He needed to attain his goal through other means, but the problem was that less elaborate methods might not work.

"It's this damn annihilation effect that is getting in my way." He grumbled as he continued to stare at the death energy that was slowly dispersing despite his best efforts to contain it. "Anything I do will cause it to pop and disappear like the earlier ghosts I have made."

As Ves thought on how to overcome this persistent problem, his sister decided to pitch in at this time.

"Mraw mraw mraw." The gray cat eloquently spoke as she patted her paw against her solid metal chest and produced multiple soft metal pinging sounds as a result. "Mraaaaw mraw."

"Huh?" He turned towards the cat in surprise. "That is a good point! The fact that you are able to possess a rudimentary cat avatar without any obvious issues is clearly a notable phenomenon. Let me take a good look at you again."

"Mraw!"

This time, the gray mechanical cat tried to turn around to escape his reach, but Helena's control over the new body was anything but perfect.

Ves easily caught his creation and brought her closer to him so that he could study the cat's body with all of his senses.

"Interesting..." He hummed as he held the cat aloft with both his hands and studied how Helena integrated with the mechanical construct and what sort of effects this induced onto the metal components. "From what I can see, the components haven't degraded at all. This might change over time, but for now it is already enough for me to draw a conclusion."

"Mraaaaw! Mraaaaaw!"

The cat ineffectually paddled her limbs in the air. It looked kind of cute given how Ves made her a tad bit smaller than his other cats.

"Metal is the answer." Ves stated as if he had just woken up to the most obvious truth in reality. "I should have thought about it before. Metal is one of the most neutral and unbiased elements that exist. Its properties are so stable and unremarkable that it is inherently capable of holding or combining with other elements!"

Mechs served as the most striking example of this relation!

An incredible variety of mech designers had emerged over the centuries. While many of them opted to pursue fairly plain and boring specializations, there were also more extreme visionaries who based their design philosophies on different elements such as the Heart of Fire or the Lord of Atlantis.

Their amazing works showed that mechs did not have to remain stuck as ordinary metal products. Machines could become much more exciting with a bit of special power.

If Ves was able to make his mechs alive by utilizing his design philosophy, then he could most certainly harness her death energy as long as he made use of metal as a stabilizing medium!

The results were often a lot stabler and more closely connected to the material realm than anchorless spiritual constructs!

"Mraw mraw!"

Ves finally put the cat back onto the worktable. "I've seen enough."

While the offended cat retreated to a safer distance from her nasty brother, Ves already headed over to the drawers and pulled out a dark alloy bar.

"I've just got a good idea. Give time to put this together."

He could have utilized his AP-VEX superfab to quickly process this material into a finished product, but he wanted to make it a touch more personal.

He became struck by inspiration and decided to channel his surging creativity by working the metal material with hand tools.

He bought out his collection of advanced precision tools and began to slim down and sculpt the metal bar.

Strangely enough, he did not visualize a specific design for his next product beforehand. He did not feel the need to follow his usual rigid but foolproof design process for a simple creation.

Instead, he let his imagination flow wild while largely letting his hands work on autopilot.

It was a pleasant and relaxing experience where he focused more on the conceptual and intangible side of his work than the nitty gritty technical work.

Of course, Ves could never work over the metal bar so easily if he didn't already possess a lot of technical skills and practice with working by hand.

His strong affinity for mechs and indirect affinity of metal through his incarnation Vulcan also assisted him a lot.

In fact, half of the reason why he was able to work as skillfully as a master smith or craftsman was because he could borrow from Vulcan's acquired expertise at any time.

While Ves got lost into his own little world while he steadily shaped the material in his possession into a more defined shape, the gray cat sat on the table and watched her brother at work.

"Mraw~" The cat lifted up a paw and licked it with a cute but dry metal tongue.

Helena enjoyed the sight of her brother at work. He always exuded a distinct charm that channeled his passion, skill and determination.

Though Ves initially attracted the gray cat's attention, her artificial eyes soon drifted down to the metal statue that increasingly took shape.

It became more and more defined as Ves shaved off the excess metal and shaped the material that remained.

Due to his exquisite skills, it did not take that long before Helena could see what Ves was trying to make.

"Mraw... mraw?!"

The almost black metal alloy slowly assumed the shape of a ferocious demon!

The wicked-looking horns, the grin that displayed fine needle-like teeth that took a fair amount of time for Ves to shape, the wings of a bat, the tail of a lizard and a pair of legs that ended with sharp, oversized claws all added to the menace and evil of the creature that Ves spontaneously gave shape.

The gray cat's body shuddered for a moment. How could her pleasant and gentle spawn such an awful monstrosity from his imagination with such ease!?

Whatever the case, once Ves put the finishing touches of his latest spontaneous work, the demon statue had reached its final form.

As Ves reverently placed it onto the work table, the gray cat sitting next to it quickly jumped a few steps backwards as if she was afraid of getting attacked or corrupted by the demon that had come to life!

"Oh, come on, Helena. This is nothing compared to you. Is the widdle big bad death goddess afraid of a funny-looking metal figurine?"

"Mraaaaw!"

"Stop exaggerating so much. I'm perfectly normal! There are no dark thoughts swimming in my mind at all! Now come over here, please. I need to squeeze a bit of extra juice out of you so that I can animate a ghost with the help of my new fiend vessel."

"MRAAW!" The gray cat turned around and ran away as if she had turned into the victim in a horror drama!